Artist Statement

Time Catcher (AKA Santa Monica Light) began on a hectic afternoon during a quick getaway from my studio in an effort to find a place where I could reclaim some peace and calm. As usual, I found myself on the beach, my default go to place. Sitting on the sand, gazing toward the vast expense of the ocean, I was able to drink in the energy, fluidity and the peace of our universe. It always transported me to a deeply meditative and serene state of being, serving me well as a simple solution to a complicated day. Despite my effort to run away from my studio I had my camera with me and decided to explore the feelings and visuals I was experiencing. It was out of this session that emerged the fist image of this series “Egy,” giving birth to a body of work that has been an ongoing journey ever since.
My fascination of using the camera to capture the feelings of timelessness and energy-flow began many years before this afternoon. Having been a filmmaker for over 15 years I always toyed with the idea of bridging one world with the other. When making film projects I am notorious about trying to drawn out the energy of stillness in a scene, much like a photograph, but while shooting still photographs I am just as hopeless about wanting to explore movement and time. As early as the first couple of years of my professional career I remember chasing the pelicans over the water with my lens, finding myself more intrigued with the way I was able to paint the water of the ocean below my subject than the flying bird. The idea of representing the fluidity of time with the simple mechanics of the camera was most likely a subconscious effort on my part to question the very nature of our universe. Time vs. eternity, frozen moment vs. many moments stacked up on top of each other -- blurring the past, present and future into one continues phenomenon.
In simple terms, the mechanics of the camera, which is designed to record a frozen moment in time by grabbing a fraction of second while holding the camera still is now used by opening the shutter for a longer time (AKA time exposure) while moving the camera to “unfreeze” a moment in the favor of capturing many moments on one frame. In a very real sense it is recording a time continuum on top of each other. With the advent of the latest digital camera technology I am able to paint with time exposure in real time by carefully constructing the images at the time of creation – in essence I am transforming my camera into a “time catcher.”